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Abstract
Projects play an important role in modern enterprises, not only as arenas for corporate renewal and capability integration, but also for
the development of leadership capacity. As a consequence, the area of project management is becoming increasingly important for universities and management educators. Previous research and reports, however, have given severe critique to much of the project management education for its lack of relevance and rigor but oered surprisingly little guidance as to what to do to deal with the problems. In
this paper, our aim is to contribute to the current debate about project management education for practicing managers. We draw on
more than ten years of experience from two senior-level education programs to show how educational practices can be developed to
stimulate knowledge co-production between practitioners and academia. We suggest a model based on a social twist of experiential
learning theory and discuss six learning modes of how to rejuvenate, stretch and improve project management education.
2008 Elsevier Ltd and IPMA. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Project management; Education; Learning; Articulation; Social twist; Experiential learning theory; Knowledge theater
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business, product development and management of innovation, although PMEX also addresses more strategic and
corporate issues. Most participants have an engineering
background and all of them are practicing managers, who
continue to work during the program. All participants are
selected and sponsored by their organizations. We believe
that the lessons learned which we present in this paper might
not work in all project management education programs,
but they may oer ideas and inspiration for how to improve
knowledge co-production and corporate practice by the use
of executive education in the world of projects.
4. A social twist of experiential learning
Since the publication of The New Production of
Knowledge [7], the theory and notion of the Mode 2 society has received a lot of interest. For instance, Hu [8] discussed the implications that the Mode 2 society has on
business schools in general, and Traneld and Starkey
[22] analyzed the framing of management research in the
Mode 2 knowledge production system. A key assumption
in the theory laid out by Gibbons et al., is that knowledge
is produced in the context of application. In other words
socially robust knowledge is superior to reliable, traditional science-based knowledge because of the intensive
testing and re-testing in the contexts of application [16].
This means that co-production of knowledge, between academics and other actors and practitioners, becomes
increasingly important. It also addresses the importance
of the articulation of context and new ways of validation
as critical components for the development of socially
robust knowledge.
The idea of social validation has important implications
for learning, in particular for experiential learning, which is
the primary focus of this paper. The most well-known
experiential learning theory is probably the one developed
by Kolb (see [10,11]). Of key importance in this theory is
the learning cycle, which consists of concrete experience,
reective observation, abstract conceptualization and
active experimentation, in combination with the dierent
learning styles. However, the theory has received a lot of
criticism, for instance because of the tendency to decontextualize the learning process and that the theory fails to
adequately account for the relationship between social
and personal learning [9, 143].
Kayes [9] suggests a linguistic twist grounded in Lacanian psychology to solve the problem of relating personal to
social learning in the experiential learning model. The programs discussed in this paper have instead developed in a
pragmatic and inductive way, which privileges an organizational and action-oriented approach a social twist of the
experiential learning theory. Of importance here is the link
between personal learning and organizational development/improvement, between in vitro and in vivo, between
reection, investigation and implementation. In other
words, the approach presented in this paper builds on a modied experiential learning model that takes many of the chal-
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Diffusion and
Implementation
Personal and
Social Action
Enaction
Investigation
Articulation
Reflection
290
Individual
Reflection
Individual
reflection, writing
and reading,
articulation of
experience.
Example: Reflection
report.
Action
Individual action,
formulation of action
plans, presentation
of measures for
improvements.
Example: Learning
contract.
Group
Experience
sharing, class
discussion, literature
reviews.
Example: Roundtable examination.
Teamwork, joint
problem-solving,
case assignments,
project work.
Example: Live case.
Organization
Organizational
dialogue, public
presentation,
articulation of lessons
learned and
implications.
Example: Knowledge
theater.
Organizational
action, sponsored
projects, top
management
assignments.
Example: Thesis
work.
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296
industrial and public sectors, and projects as sites of learning are often critical for creating general management talents where leaders are given the opportunity of leading
an organization, in many cases a hugely complex organization, from start to nish, from birth to death. As educators,
we have an important role to stay attuned with the latest
research ndings, and doing research and contributing to
the development of knowledge in project management.
This paper has emphasized the need for having researchers
who are active in the knowledge co-production process a
demanding process that requires the educator to combine
research and practice in a unique way. However, the payo
might be rewarding of generating both new knowledge
and improving practice.
In this paper, we have provided a few examples from
two small-scale programs in which we have elaborated a
knowledge co-production logic and developed a social
twist of the experiential learning theory. The underlying
idea for our suggested twist was a conviction that we can
do more with what we have already got that existing
learning practices can be stretched, and elaborated further
to meet the challenges of the Mode 2 society. We did this
by oering a framework with dierent loci of learning
and learning practices that can be designed to bridge loci
of learning and the endpoints of the reection/action
dichotomy. For example, individual learning can be turned
into collective learning, and individual learning can be further developed if articulated by writing reection reports.
Therefore the paper continued by discussing dierent practices of what learning practices might be used to stimulate
articulation and action, and in what way these processes
link to organizational improvements and corporate action.
Given the increasing and important role of projects in
society and the fact that projects are and should be schools
for leaders, project management educators must not be
content with only following the discussions of management
education they should be taking the lead in this
development!
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the help and support
from many of our colleagues in developing the ideas presented in the paper. In particular our current and former
colleagues at the PMEX and APM programs: Rune Ols man, Thomas De Ming, Helen
son, Ove Brandes, Per A
Anderson and Johan Holtstrom. We also appreciate the
support and comments from our collaborators within the
KITE Excellence Center, Kaye Remington, the participants at the Bournemouth Conference, and one anonymous reviewer. Financial support was received from
VINNOVA and the PMEX Foundation.
References
[1] Argyris C, Schon D. Organizational learning. Reading: AddisonWesley; 1978.